Archive for the 'Science Communication' Category

I’ve now been blogging for over 10 years and I’ve also written plenty of other news articles, appeared on TV, radio and in podcasts, and done whole rafts of talks and events as well as writing a book (here’s a huge list of links to things I have done) and consulted for plenty more too. I do this because I enjoy it and I think it’s very important for scientists to help engage with the public and explin what they do and what they have learend and why (and even more so when it’s research based on public money). It’s nice to get recognised for this kind of work but it is not why I do it.

However, at least some of this work is now undertaken as part of my job at Queen Mary University and so I need to try and get a handle on what I am actually achieving. So, as a result, I have a small but very important request. If you have literally 1 minute and have read my book, seen one of my talks, read a blog or article I’ve written, listened to a podcast I did, saw a TV show I consulted on, sent me an e-mail that I replied to, chatted to me at science festival, or really anything at all from my outreach programs, please do fill in this tiny form. It’s really important for me and does take seconds. Please also share this far and wide with friends and family, I know I have hundreds of subscribers to this blog but my book has sold over 10 000 copies and some of my videos or podcasts I know have had audiences in the 100 000s so I really hope this message can spread far and wide and reach those who do not read this blog.

I don’t ask for much on here, so please spare me a minute of your time to fill this in and to share the link, retweet it, post it to a messageboard, or anywhere else some people may see it who like their dinosaurs.

Becuase writing the Musings annd being on Twitter (and perviously doing the FLugsaurier blog and pages, and Ask A Biologist, and The Lost Worlds for the Guardian) isn’t enough, I finally decided to start up a proper page on Facebook. So if you want to follow me there and post soem dinosaur stuff and get more involved in discussions and research then hope over here to Dave Hone’s Dinosaurs page.

I’m still doing other outreach things like talks, consultations for documentaries and podcasts (here’s a very recent one on pterosaurs) and I’m writing a second book so there’s still lots more going on. But this new page will, I hope, allow me to engage with a different audience in a different way so do please go over there and like the page and share it around.

Well it’s been coming of course but today sees the publication of my first book. I’ve always wanted to write one and now it’s done and I can (sort of) relax. There’s lots of PR stuff ahead and the official book launch tomorrow, but there’s not much to do now except let it go free and hope that most people enjoy it.

I’ve been writing about dinosaurs and palaeo one way or another for nearly 10 years now between various blogs and ventures as well as the odd review paper and book chapter that are for more of a general audience than a typical paper, but this is obviously a much bigger and rather different undertaking. It’s also rather different in that I was writing for something of a different audience (certainly compared to here where I generally assume readers know at least a little anatomy, what a phylogeny is, what the main time periods were etc.) and over a long book you want to introduce quite a few topics and aspects of not just tyrannosaurs, but also their contemporaries and major issues like behaviour, anatomy, local environments, extinction and more. It turned out to be a lot to cover and while trying to keep it interesting for the reader.

Hopefully, I’ve managed that but it is nervy letting this out into the wider world with little control over it. That may sound odd given how much I’ve written online, but with a blog (either here, on Pterosaur.net or on the Guardian) you have a fair idea of who your audience is likely to be, and people will soon leave if they don’t like it. Getting someone to pick up and be immediately drawn to, and then stick with, a whole tome is rather different so obviously I am nervous and curious as to how it goes from here.

The book is very much in the popular science mould and so while I would hope even some academics and researchers would get something from it and enjoy it, really it is aimed squarely at the general public and those with little or no knowledge of dinosaurs or paleontology and even biology in general. As a result, despite the fact that the book is around 85 000 words long, it really doesn’t delve into the tiny details of but tries to cover a broad spectrum of tyrannosaur origins, evolution and their biology. Given my interests there’s quite a lot on ecology and behaviour and there’s a few bits of informed speculation or suggestions that I hope are novel and interesting, but also clearly flagged as such.

It was a huge effort to write all of this while keeping up with a full time academic job and try and keep my other blogs ticking over, and it was also important to try and update things. The last few years have seen a near endless stream of new tyrannosaurs being named and some parts of the book I changed a half dozen times to reflect the addition of new species, and with the book going to print in February, it’s inevitably already out of date thanks to the most recent addition to the ranks of this clade, despite my efforts. Still, I have tried to make this a modern take on tyrannosaurs and I hope I have managed to overcome a few of the more persistent anachronisms and misconceptions about these animals. Anyway, enough of the (brilliant) text and its (brilliant) author, and time to talk about some other aspects of the book and to give a minimal amount of credit to other people.

The book is illustrated by Scott Hartman and there’s around a dozen figures of his scattered through the book, with lots of skeletals (especially of tyrannosaurs, but also various other dinosaurs too) and other little bits, a number of which were done especially for the book, but will be popping up on his website if they haven’t already. I’m obviously especially grateful to Scott for finding the time to do these and putting so much time and effort into them, the book benefits enormously from it.

There is also a colour section in the middle with numerous photos of various specimens and some reconstructions. Plenty of these have been in print in various places before but there are some novel shots and views of various things and I’ve been blessed with the generous assistance of numerous colleagues and friends who have sent in pictures and allowed me to use them. While I’m on the subject therefore I must thank Peter Falkingham, Jordan Mallon, Larry Witmer, Xu Xing, Lu Junchang and Phil Currie for providing various images and also the Royal Tyrrell, LACM, IVPP, Hayashibara, Mongolia Palaeontological, Royal Sasketchewan, Carnegie and New Mexico Museums, and also Don Brinkman, Mark Loewen and Matt Lamanna for helping me negotiate to get a couple of the images. Finally I must also thank Darren Tanke and Chisaka Sakata for the photos of me that are on the covers of the paper- and hardbacks respectively.

Finally with regard to the text I had a series of editors and assistants at Bloomsbury though most especially I want to thank Jim Martin for commissioning the damned thing in the first place and also in particular for supporting my campaign for the colour scheme of the cover. Several friends of mine including Marc Vincent (yes, that one) read through an early draft for me and provided useful feedback and special mention goes to Tom Holtz for reading through it looking for errors (and mercifully he found only one, so I’m happy to blame him for any others that slipped through). A whole host of other friends, collaborators, coauthors and colleagues are thanked in the acknowledgements for sharing their knowledge of tyrannosaurs with me over the years and I hope this book helps do justice to these amazing animals.

Well, the book is out now (actually I’ve had reports of it being on sale since Monday) and while I’ve always wanted to say it’s available in all good bookshops actually I have no idea. It is available online (including direct from the publishers Bloomsbury) and it’s in at least a few physical places. I know it’s available in hardback (paperback coming next year) and e-book versions and there’s an audio version coming via Audible, and hopefully a few translations too. The US have to wait till early June, but not long for you to wait and in the meantime you can enjoy me talking about the book here. Hopefully many people will find it one way or another (such as in charity shops for £2 in a few weeks) but more importantly I do hope people enjoy it. Happy reading.

So the official publication date is drawing near (21st of April) of my first book and I actually have a physical copy in my hands! Oooh! It’s got nice pictures and photos and words and everything!

Obviously I’m very pleased but I am also rather nervous about the whole thing – people will be paying actual real money and I really don’t want to let them down. I know you can’t please everyone and even the greatest books will not appeal to every person that picks up and reads even a few pages but despite the years of blogging and outreach stuff this is a new style and form and it’s rather more global in spread than even online media. So, lots of nerves my end.

However, anyone who does buy it and hurls it across the room a few hours later in frustration may at least be mollified by having paid 30% below the cover price thanks to a discount being offered by the publishers. If you order direct from the publishers Bloomsbury before May 31st and enter the promo code ‘DINOSAUR’ at the checkout, it should be reduced. (This has only just been set-up, so do leave a comment if this doesn’t work, or indeed if it does to let me know it’s working!).

Finally, if you are in and around London there is a small formal book launch on the 22nd of April. Tickets are free (but you need to reserve them here in advance). It won’t be long or special, I’ll talk about the book for a bit, answer some questions and sign any copies going (available for sale there, and also at a hefty discount).

So I’ve been keep this quiet for a while, but for the last year or so I’ve been writing what will become my first (and hopefully not only) book. It’s a popular science book with Bloomsbury Press and their new Sigma range of titles, all of which are science / natural history and it’s due out in early 2016. Obviously it’s a dinosaur effort and this is focused squarely on the tyrannosaurs. It tries to cover everything from their origin to extinction and that means evolution, taxonomy, anatomy, physiology and mechanics, and in particular my areas of special interest in ecology and behaviour. It’s not quite wall-to-wall dinosaurs since there’s the context of their environments, competing carnivores and potential prey and that means some other things do at least get a look it.

As will be obvious from the cover, Scott Hartman has been involved and in addition to the skeletals adorning it, there’s a bunch of his renditions inside too. (Those who read his blog might have spotted the recent plethora of tyrannosaurs and this book is part of the reason for his push on them). So that means at least some bits of the book will be accurate and in a desperate attempt to make sure the text isn’t too littered with errors, Tom Holtz has been good enough to plow through the entire thing for me (so I’ll blame any remaining mistakes on him going too fast). More seriously, I really can’t thank them both enough.

Right, that’s enough shameless self-promotion for now, so I’ll return to editing the thing and watching the Mexican standoff between my geckos. Thanks for reading the blog, and hope you might read the book.

This post is pretty much just an appeal. With a colleague of mine in the Queen Mary psychology department I’ve designed a survey about attitudes to science in sci-fi and other fiction films. The survey takes about 5 mins to complete and as an incentive there’s Amazon vouchers to be won (you can also complete the survey anonymously, though naturally then, you don’t get to be in the draw).

Please do go HERE and fill it in, and also please do share this as widely as possible and ping it to people who have seen the film. Obviously promoting it around I’m hitting lots of dino-fans and palaeo people and while there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m keen to reach a) more people generally, and b) more ‘non-experts’ / ‘general public’, so passing this on to friends, family, colleagues etc. is a huge deal for me.

Finally, I recently sat down the people from Faculti Media. This is an interesting new concept where they create short videos of researchers talking about their work to provide a platform for outreach. It was great fun to do (but tricky, although edited, it was close to being live with only a couple of takes at the thing) and I think it offers a new approach with nice little bite-sized chunks of science explained by the researchers. In my case, it was on sexual selection and socio-sexual signaling in dinosaurs and it’s come out quite well, (though clearly the camera was focused on the background, not me, whoops!).

The next few days are likely to be very busy for me and this weekend I’m off on holiday, so I very much doubt I’ll be blogging on next Monday. This is a bit of a shame as those who occasionally glance at the bottom half of the sidebar on the Musings will realise that it pretty much marks the 5th anniversary of the blog. Of course very longtime readers will know I was going for some months on the old Dinobase site before cranking up this version on wordpress, but this has for most people always been the home of my pronouncements, even if there is also now Pterosaur.net, the Lost Worlds, and various bits on other parts of the web too.

So I’m naturally really rather pleased to have reached this mark, having also not too long past gone over 1.25 million hits and 1250 posts on here. It has, obviously, been a lot of work. While naturally there have been plenty of short posts (even one liners, and those of just a single image) and a fair number of guest pieces, I’ve obviously poured a huge amount of time and effort into this over the years, and I’d like to think it’s made a fair impression on a goodly number of people. Plenty of great dinosaur blogs by interesting and talented researchers seem to have fallen by the wayside, so if nothing else I can claim a fair bit of persistence.

Right, well to ‘celebrate’, here’s some pictures of a Tyrannosaurus mount from the Tyrrell that I was going to post anyway (so hardly the greatest party ever thrown really). Still, it’s hardly an inappropriate thing to include as I have done my share of tyrannosaur work and this is a neat mount. Oddly, I wasn’t too happy with the photos originally, you can’t see too many details, but I rather like the way this looms out of the murk with the animal trailing off into darkness.

Although the skull looks great from either side, once you get a shot up the nose, it’s rather clear how distorted this is. There’s quite a bit of difference between the two sides and it’s obvious there’s been a fair amount of squishing to the bones to give this rather asymmetric appearance.

Well, that’s it for now. Not sure if there will be another 5 years, but I’m not planning on stopping just yet and I’ll be annoyed at least if I don’t reach 1500 posts having gone this far, though with my other commitments, it may take a good long while yet.

Regular Musings readers might have noticed that I do, technically, have a research page on Google. I set it up a few years ago more or less as something a bit more formal to hold records of what I’d published etc. in the days before Google Scholar metrics and which was more public than an Academia.edu profile and rather less blog-like that, well, this. I have updated it from time to time, but never found much use for it, and didn’t have the nous or time to turn it into a more ‘proper’ (and at least nice looking) site.

Doing an update the other day, I spotted a file upload option which I must have either overlooked or ignored previously. I have a for a while been looking out for a way to make my papers publicly available but really didn’t have the incentive to start yet another site just for that, and if I’d realised I could have done it on the Google pages I’d have done it years ago. Still, water under the bridge, they’re now all up.

So, if you go here and scroll to the bottom of the page you can download (nearly) all my papers. Some are still ‘in press’ so I don’t actually have anything I can upload, though as a bonus, there’s a couple of extended abstracts and unreviewed comment-type papers in there too. Hopefully it’s pretty clear what they all are, but regardless, the real issue is that they’re now accessible so go ahead and read ’em.

I do have a couple of bits lined up for the Musings over the next week or two, including my traditional end-of-year roundup. The Lost Worlds has been rather more quiet of late than I’d have liked owing to massive teaching commitments. These have finally cleared up, leaving me time to err, catch up on all the work I’ve let drag owing to the teaching commitments, so blogging is still a bit behind.

On the upside, I did find time recently to record an interview with the Palaeocast guys and you can catch it all here. It’s a potted history of my research and with some thoughts about sexual selection, feeding behaviour in theropods, the great rush of Chinese fossil discoveries and sci comms material like Ask A Biologist. So in the absence of more text-based stuff, drop on over there and have a listen.

I realised the other day that I have all manner of little posts, podcast contributions and the like spread around the net where I’ve made small contributions or guest appearances on various forums. While I’ve mentioned at least a few of there on here at one time or another, it seemed sensible to put them all if one place if only so I could find them again. Still, at least a few readers might be interested in some of these so I thought I’d make a post out of it and leave it here. I can’t find / remember everything so actually if you do know of something I did that’s not here, err, can you let me know?